I did a featured reading in Coldspring this last week up a very narrow set of white stairs on the face-lifted shanty second floor of a "healing arts" emporium.
The room was tight and held together by expensive acrylic on canvas.
(One 5 by 8 depicting a few grey orbs on burnt orange and neon lime angrily beseeched 7,500!)
We arrived just as an oily cabal of art braggarts and posturing parvenu's bustled down the stairs drunkenly as if to outrun the amethyst miasma of Merlot that permeated their presence.
I was to feature with Dennis Bressack,
a taciturn elder gentleman who attended the event with his attractive
wife who said a very few words and left before the open mic had begun.
Mr. Bressack delighted the small audience with a forceful presentation integrating political prose with poems about his adopted son and the importance of love in our society.
I read second, and performed a set comprised almost entirely of material from Gehenna,
including the debut of a piece called Strawberry Cough.
Had a few chances to improv which went pleasantly with the exception of accidentally butchering the final transition of my "new years poem" (And Now the Civilized People Eat Each Other)
Some usual suspects were there and a few neophytes,
namely an interesting fellow with long blond lochs that donned the moniker Pinky.
Pinky would end up reading some excellent work, of which on his behalf I now have the ability to reread, review and thoroughly digest.
Glen River read a compelling piece about Eros and Psyche that began with the memorable line
" I am the stroke that slips away hair from your neck"
Ted Gil read an autumnal poem I'm quite fond of,
and Christopher Wheeling resolved the open mic with as he put it
"a piece from the burgeoning Asbestos collection" entitled "Sweat in My Respirator."
Everyone mingled a good bit there after and quaffed mass quantities of poor brown water
and tiny little bottles of unrefrigerated Figi aqua.
The evening was sweet and the dewy balm of ionosphere and the death of leaves deliberately pricked the nostrils with orgiastic incentive and the whole damned wet night swallowed you whole and could only smile as you tickled its innards with the
swollen palms you'd used to prayer with.
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